On 21/05/2021 00.46, David T-G wrote:
pj --
...and then -pj said... % ... % been created) the following seems extremely interesting: % % hdparm can do it. % % --security-erase PWD ... % % --security-erase-enhanced PWD [snip]
You mentioned concern about reading and writing memory chips in relation to your quest to "prepare" for SuSE. In addition the fact that to extreme secure-level erasure of any data that may be present is not necessary, writing the multiple times required for such causes MORE wear on the device and hastens its death as much as anything will.
Wait. The "security erase" feature mentioned above is not the "paranoid security erase" that some external applications do. It runs only once, and the most important detail is that it is done by the disk firmware, not the host computer CPU. Thus what it actually does depends on the disk manufacturer. The program simply tells the disk to please erase itself completely. What happens is up to the disk, and as far as I know it is fast. This is not what some tools out there claim to do to safe erase a disk by writing several times with zeroes or other patterns.
Whipping up a fresh partition table is more than enough :-)
And the raid metadata if it exists. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from oS Leap 15.1 x86_64 (Minas Tirith))